ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the findings of an ethnographic research project that investigated the datafication of family life in two world cities: London and Los Angeles and argues for the importance of doing ‘data ethnography’. Inspired by both analyses of global culture and critical media studies, I play with the notion that when we think about data ethnography, we can look at the multiple ways in which the lived experience of big data and surveillance capitalism is contingent on context and culturally specific political economic networks, sensory experiences, and personal understandings of technologies and privacy. The chapter also argues that to carry out data ethnography, we might develop a multi-method approach; one that simultaneously follows the data and the people, and that brings together auto-ethnographic/sensory research with a political economic analysis of structures and technologies of data. This type of worldly data ethnography may enable us to appreciate the human and cultural complexity of datafication while taking into account critical questions about place, power, and politics.
